More than Just Me

Guide to India Wedding, Part III (The Intangibles )

I am sorry for keeping you waiting for the part 3 for so long. Actually you can’t blame because my posts are based on actual research and first hand wedding experiences. While I am typing this, my hands are already soaked in the greasy wedding sweets and my mind is still confused with irrelevant wedding themes that people plan these days. And you know that wedding affairs in India are seasonal in nature because no one wants to mess with the heavenly bodies whose favorite past time activity is to check your daily to-do list and get grumpy about it.

In this part, I am still covering the wedding characters however, I am only focusing on the “intangible” character that rules the universe of weddings:

1. Respect:

Respect the damn authority

Indian family tree and respect hierarchy is so confusing that you can sometimes only wish for the linear hierarchy designs of corporates and drug dealers. For example the person who is officially sleeping with your cousin deserves more respect than your uncle who brings you gifts. And you cannot escape the situation by giving equal respect to everyone. That is not acceptable behavior. You have to give extra respect to some of them.

So, here are some “respect” techniques you can use on the deserving respected figures:

1. Suffocate him with excessive touching of feet/hugging/holding hands and cancelling the total opportunity of his personal space.

2. Force-overfeed him without caring for his digestion (because Respect does not understand Science)

3. Offer him to buy goodies, gizmos or private jet for him even though you can’t afford a decent pair of socks for yourself.

4. Continuously insult your spouse/sibling in front on him to make “Respected” feel good about himself.

2. Rituals

Even the people who might have been married thrice cannot confidently say that they know all the wedding Rituals. Some rituals involve bride throwing food at her parents & make them cry (ok, I made perfectly nice ritual sound nasty) or young brats stealing shoes and getting rewarded for it.

3. Entertainment

Because Mere Yaar ki Shaadi hai

In Silk Smitha’s biopic Dirty Picture, her character clearly states that in India, three things are very important: Entertainment, Entertainment and Entertainment. No one spoke with such honesty on the big screen before and the wedding organizers made sure there is enough Entertainment quotient in the 3 month long wedding ceremony. Based on my research, this is what we Indians do to entertain us during wedding :

1. Role playing especially as snake charmers and Mozart.

2. Dancing awkwardly.

3. Complain endlessly about the wedding arrangements.

4. Give a political platform to satisfy the RSS uncle’s propaganda against homosexuality and backless blouses.

5. Prove a idiotic correlation between tsunami and Chinese emergence in foreign trade (or anything in the same scale of idioticness )

6. Brag about distance friend or relative who is either in Bollywood, Politics or involve in match-fixing.

7. Artificial Public Display of Devotion.

8. Make most of the Car-O-Bar.

4. Honor

Everyone gets an honor

While organizing the wedding, the hosts not only represent their families but also their community, tribe, regional deity, caste, state and the nation (if you were wondering why patriotic songs are played during baraat procession ). The honor of all these are on the sorry shoulders of the hosts (not only honor but also the bills) and the people around him make sure that the hosts are reminded about it again and again. The unwritten honor code states that being excessively modest and using all the weapons of mass-morality takes to you there.

5. Hospitality

Baraat ka Swagath

Hospitality is such a big part of wedding that even for hoteliers and airliners , attending a wedding is a learning curve. The epic commercial by Pan Parag where the groom’s father, Shashi Kapoor states that their guest’s should be welcome by Pan Parag became Indian version stony teenage party prop. Pan Parag became a ice-breaker for the discussion between the two families. It allowed them to prove “trashier/holier than thou” (depending on the situation)and moral ego massage each other.

14 thoughts on “Guide to India Wedding, Part III (The Intangibles )”

I would rather the parents from both the sides gave the money they spend on the function to the bride and groom who could go on a world tour 😀 Indian weddings surely cost more than a round the world ticket for two! But then I have always been a little crazy!

hahaha Avi it is very funny.. i had missed earlier part.. Let me check that too. The weddings are imitating bollywood like crazy. The trend of copying wedding rituals (means whatever is in latest fashion nowadays) is extending to traditional no-nonsense weddings which used to happen in Kerala too. Its all a marketing blitz and the wedding industry rocks.. ‘Cause, eventually everyone will get married and each event has a good budget saved up by the hosts… leading to economic stimulation and prosperity for all except the one hosting the wedding.

I totally agree with you. Every time i attend a wedding, i think i am in a wrong industry. Everything useless otherwise, start making sense and everyone is happy or unhappy about it.
Will love to hear your comments on the earlier parts too 🙂

Lol…Good post. I just read another post about a wedding written by an American Indian and it was so vitriolic ( he kept referring to downtrodden Indian women in almost every paragraph) that it managed to upset me and make me wish I could harangue him for a full 15 minutes. I like your take – funny and very perceptive without actually saying Indian weddings are a complete waste to time. We crib and rant but who doesn’t love a good Indian wedding, especially the bride! 🙂

Definitely you should run away and get married with no one around to hug and kiss. Will save all your relatives the hassle of getting new clothes for the occasion, spending money and travelling to your wedding, listen to other boring relatives, possible put up with a generation of people who don’t want them around and in the end suffer too!

Well I’m glad you’re happily married. Many young people think they are doing their family a great favour by getting married the traditional way little realising that it can be quite a pain for the parents and relatives too!